Re: ISO C++ and Octave

[John W. Eaton]

On  1-Feb-2001, Mumit Khan <address@hidden> wrote:

| On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, John W. Eaton wrote:
| 
| > Nope.  That looks pretty bad.  Sort of like
| > 
| >   octave:6> sin (pi)
| >   ans =  1.2246e-16
| > 
| > (would it really hurt to make this a special case?).
| 
| I must confess that I don't have a opinion either way that I
| can back up. On one hand, we certainly can't expect exact
| precision from finite precision numerics, but on the other
| hand, users of software such as Octave may have come to expect
| certain "nice-ness". Don't know ...

I don't plan to add special cases like this to Octave.  I was just
wondering out loud why if we define M_PI, the libraries don't check
for a few special cases.  I don't see how it would hurt anything, but
maybe someone knows better.  Perhaps because it would be tougher to
guarantee that

  sin (N*pi) == 0 for all N = 0, 1, 2, ...

jwe